The Inception Meeting of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) supported project “Enabling Transboundary Cooperation and Integrated Water Resources Management in the extended Drin River Basin” took place in Tirana, on 16 December 2015, at the presence of Mr. Edmond Panariti, Minister of Agriculture, Rural Development and Water Administration, Mr. Ferid Agani, Minister of Environment and Spatial Planning, as well as Mr. Stevo Temelkovski, Deputy Minister of Environment and Physical Planning.

TWG 7 Meeting held
The 7th meeting of the WACDEP Technical Working Group (TWG) was held on 28th July, 2015 at the Water Resources Commission (WRC) conference room. The meeting was presided over by Mr. Ben Ampomah, Executive Secretary of WRC. The meeting considered the progress made so far with WACDEP implementation, challenges faced and the way forward to enhance efficiency in the project management. The draft 2015 Semi Annual Report was also discussed and approved during the meeting. Also present at the meeting was the newly appointed Chairman of the GWP-WA Technical Committee, Dr. Yaw Opoku-Ankomah.
Preparations for GWP’s participation in Stockholm World Water Week 2015 have been going on for several months and everything is now ready. The network is organising a number of events and GWP representatives will participate in many sessions throughout the week of 23-28 August.
Danka Thalmeinerova is Senior Knowledge Management Officer at the GWP global secretariat in Stockholm. She joined the global secretariat in 2008 but has a long history with GWP before that – both at regional and country level. In the on-going interview series to mark GWP’s 20th Anniversary, Thalmeinerova speaks about her job: “I did not envisage how inspiring but challenging this would be.”
GWP Central and Eastern Europe is releasing today two short papers presenting the achievements of two demonstration projects within the Integrated Drought Management Programme in Central and Eastern Europe.
Sustainable Water Integrated Management – Support Mechanism (SWIM-SM), the largest water-related regional project supported by the European Commission (EC) during 2010-2015, successfully concluded its phase I, and held its Final Steering Committee (SC) Meeting in Luxembourg, on the 25th of November. With a budget of 7.7 million Euros, the project was implemented in nine south Mediterranean countries[1] by a consortium led by LDK and with GWP-Med as the project technical director.
The GWP Cameroon hosted in Yaounde, the 8th WACDEP Technical Coordination meeting from the 28-30th September 2016.
Attendees to this regional meeting were the members of WACDEP Coordination Unit, regional and national WACDEP program Managers from the five Regions (GWP Med, GWP SA, GWP EA, GWP WAf and GWP CAf); the GWP-O Head of Program and the GWP-Cameroon Chair who led the GWP-CAf team.
The last technical coordination meeting held in Yaounde over three days had double main objectives. The first objective was to define the approaches for the regions and Country Water Partnerships (CWPs) to better handle the project document preparation process of WACDEP 2 and agree on the timelines of submitting the document to WACDEP Coordination Unit (WACDEP CU) for review. Therefore, two approaches were proposed with regards to the budget constraints: (a) to recruit a consultant for facilitating the process and (b) to constitute a team of experts of the WACDEP Technical Working Group (TWG) to develop the project documentation with a support from the WACDEP CU.
The second one was to agree on the roadmap for drafting the WACDEP (2011-2016) final report to submit it by 15 of October 2016.